Web hosting is a must when you want your website to be up and running on the Internet, be it for online business, blogging or any other service. But with so many web hosting solutions, it can get a bit confusing to choose an ideal type of hosting for your site.
Shared hosting vs. cloud hosting- both these web hosting solutions are popular amongst users, each having their own pros and cons. So which one is the best for your hosting requirements?
Myriads of businesses go for shared hosting due to their cheaper rates, whereas cloud hosting comes with its own perks!
Below we have comprehensively explained the main differences between shared hosting and cloud hosting, so you can make an informed decision:
Let’s dive in:
Shared hosting is the most popular hosting solution as it is cheaper and easily available to deploy. In such a type of hosting, a single physical server and its resources are utilized by multiple users. Each user shares a specific amount of bandwidth and resources such as disk space, bandwidth, RAM, etc.
Each user can run multiple sites on their account, so a single server might end up hosting hundreds and thousands of websites at the same time. If another website on a shared server uses multiple resources, there are chances of your website getting slow.
Hence, shared hosting is good for small websites who have a very limited budget. It is also perfect if:
Easy to deploy: One of the biggest advantages of shared hosting is that it is easy to deploy and it gets your site live quickly.
No administrative responsibilities: Shared hosting provider manages all responsibilities of maintaining and upgrading the shared server. Therefore, you need not worry about any technical responsibilities whatsoever.
Cheap: Shared hosting is cheaper as compared to cloud hosting and other hosting solutions. This is due to the reason that multiple resources of a physical server are shared amongst users.
Easy to manage: Shared hosting does not demand much investment, but provides good online presence at the same time.
Limited number of resources: Websites cannot really serve huge amount of customers, as a shared hosting solution has limited number of resources. Thus, it cannot really handle sudden traffic spikes or peak times efficiently.
Slow load times: If other users are utilizing too many resources on a shared server, it might hinder the performance of your website and make it slow.
Server downtime: Since a shared server serves multiple requests, it may experience server overload. This in turn may cause downtime for your site, or even crashing in the long run.
Less user control: Users do not have much control over features, and they cannot really choose or scale features as per their requirements. All the users have to share the same features of the shared server as others.
Cloud hosting does not limit your website to a single server location. Rather in cloud hosting, you get to use a bunch of resources of multiple servers, as and when required. These storage and computing resources are scattered across multiple virtual machines to prevent compute overloads.
Therefore cloud hosting is ideal for large websites that often face heavy traffic, as it allows for seamless expansion. And it also prevents server overload by switching you to another cloud server, in case if your server gets overwhelmed.
In terms of security and reliability, cloud hosting is better than shared hosting as it imposes various server-level security measures such as encryption, key authentication, firewalls, anti-malware systems and so on.
However, all of the high-end features of cloud hosting come at a cost, so cloud hosting plans are certainly costlier than shared hosting solutions.
Cloud hosting is best for you if:
High performance: Since cloud hosting deploys multiple number of servers, the performance and reliability in such type of hosting is high. If one server has a problem, your site will simply be switched to another server to avoid website downtime.
Scalability: Cloud hosting allows you to quickly scale at large; as it lets you use myriads of resources and only pay for those which you use. Which also means that a business can easily serve high traffic spikes, as cloud hosting allows you to add more resources as per your needs and scale up seamlessly.
Faster load times: Cloud hosting provider effectively integrates a solid caching mechanism, which is why your site will have faster page load times. And since it does not limit the use of resources, other sites won’t affect or hinder with your website's page load times.
Storage space: Cloud hosting provides a huge amount of storage space as compared to shared hosting. This feature is greatly beneficial for web professionals who design and build web applications for customers. Also, large storage space allows providers to host a large number of websites at the same time, and manage them efficiently through a single control panel.
Backup and Recovery: Cloud hosting keeps a backup of your database at different data centers and integrates multiple backup mechanism tools to recover lost data. We have seen many businesses suffer and eventually fail due to data loss and lack of disaster recovery mechanisms. And that’s why, backup and recovery is one of the best highlights of cloud hosting solution.
Cost-effective: As compared to shared hosting, cloud hosting may be expensive. But at the same time, cloud hosting saves considerable operational and capital costs, as the IT infrastructure is maintained by cloud hosting providers.
Cost: Due to extra features in cloud hosting, users may have to pay a tad bit extra as compared to shared hosting.
Platform Dependency: Users may experience vendor lock-in due to being stuck with a single cloud hosting vendor and not being able to migrate to another cloud platform. This can be avoided by simply understanding what your cloud provider offers, and checking whether migration to another platform is easy or not.
Less flexibility: SLA’s and policies of some cloud hosting providers may often restrict users as to what they can and cannot do with the hosting service. But the majority of the cloud hosting providers are quite flexible and do not impose much restriction.
Thus, we can conclude that cloud hosting does NOT really have much cons up its sleeve, except for expensiveness.
We hope this detailed post on Shared Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting has made you understand the main differences between both these web hosting solutions. No doubt, Alibaba is the best cloud hosting provider in terms of security, scalability and elasticity. No matter what size of business you run, there’s always an ideal solution here that will cater to all your cloud hosting needs.
As for which one is best for your business, it really comes down to the type, requirements and budget of your business. I should always recommend choosing FiveM Server Hosting for better performance and scalability.
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